The Poster for the original Saw. It sets out the nature of the film clearly, that it is about the explicit and exploitative cutting off of limbs, which either disgusts the viewer or appeals to their sadistic instincts. Saw is about two, seemingly innocent strangers who have been chained to pipes in a dirty bathroom made into a makeshift torture chamber, where in between them lies a dead body with a gun in its hand. They have been put there by the sadistic jigsaw serial killer who places his victims in traps that involve torturing themselves or others in order to survive and escape. Dr Lawrence Gordon, a surgeon with a family is given a choice; He has to kill Adam Stanheight, a photographer chained to the other end of the room by 6pm or otherwise his family will die and he will rot in the room. His family are tied to the bed in their home and threatened by an orderly from Gordon's hospital, who is part of Jigsaw's trap as he is forced to carry out Jigsaw's plan. By playing along with the game Gordon finds bullets to kill Adam using the gun from the body's hand and each find a hacksaw that could be used cut their chains off, except it is not sharp enough to cut through metal but it is for flesh and bone. This is where the title and severed limb in the poster come from. (Wan 2004).
This Prisoner and torture narrative is interwoven with a detective narrative as Detective Tapp and the police are trying to catch the jigsaw killer and he becomes obsessesed in the process after Jigsaw kills his partner in a trap in his lair. Flashbacks used in the film reveal the jigsaw killer chooses victims who lead immoral lives or waste them and through his traps he tries to make them value life by forcing them to use torture to escape. In past traps it is revealed a man who cut himself is put in a barbed wire maze and has to escape before the trap door closes. Only one survives, Amanda, a drug addict because she killed a paralysed victim to obtain a key from his intestines that would take a trap off that would forcibly separate her jaw. It turns out Gordon is placed there for committing adultury although he does not go through with it. Saw essentially implicates all these characters into an intricate trap and forces them to use violence to escape. (Wan 2004).
This is another poster for Saw, which features the tag line "How much blood would you shed to stay alive?", which is the central question of the film as people are made to torture to live. This a key theme of the torture genre as ordinary people are given the means of torture. The term "Torture porn", which is the genre that Saw has been put into, combines two representations of the body through sex and violence that exposes the privacy of these bodily acts for viewing (Tziallas 2010). It lets people watch explicit, exploitative acts on the body that people should not be allowed to see and this breaks down the boundary between the private and public and lets you know bluntly what is going underneath the surface of society and human nature. Saw is the first film that does not rely on feeding your imagination of the unknown neither does it use suspense or suprise to shock you, it lets you know you are going to see pain and violence and forces you to watch it. It scares by showing violent acts like cutting a foot of with a saw instead of the mystery of where the killer is or what he or she will do next.
It is the fear of the known that this genre plays on and it is argued that the use of surveillance adds the fear because it breaks down privacy and is a source of institutional power (ibid.). This genre is very much linked to 9/11 and the use of surveillance to catch terrorists that could be anybody meaning everybody is being watched (ibid.). In Saw Gordon and Adam are being watched by a camera viewing the torturous proceedings and Jigsaw's lair that Tapp discovers is full of surveillance equipment (Wan 2004). In addition the use of flashbacks asks the viewer to connect the dots to see what happens and so the intricate narrative is key aspect of these films and makes sense of the film's other tagline: "Every Puzzle has its pieces."
Part of the appeal then is not just the invasive nature of the violence but also the idea that they know where the violence is coming from and how it is applied, reducing its uncertainty. But as Wes Craven argued the popularity of the genre came out of the fact Americans were living in a "Horror Show" due to the increased fears of average americans being subject to violence (Gordon 2006). It is just reflective of what is going on in the world and that they are subversive of the immoral Iraq war politics of the Bush Administration as Eli Roth, director of Hostel argues (Keegan 2006;McLintock 2006, 34). This makes torture porn clever rather than mindless and suggests these films are undeserving of this title.
References
Edelstein, David. 2006. Now Playing at your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn. Why has America gone nuts for blood, guts and sadism. New York Magazine, 28 January. Retrieved from nymag.com.
Gordon, Devin. 2006. "Horror Show." Newsweek, 3 April, 60-62. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier
Keegan, Rebecca Winters. 2006. "The Splat Pack." Time, 30 October, 66-70. Retrieved from Middle Search Plus
McLintock, Pamela. 2006. "Blood Brothers." Variety, 25-31 December, 1-2. Retrieved from the Film and Television Literature Index
Tziallas, Evangelas. 2010. Torture Porn and Surveillance Culture. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 52. http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/evangelosTorturePorn/text.html.
Wan, James. 2004. Saw. DVD. Los Angeles, CA: Lionsgate Films.
Questions: What do you think of the term Torture Porn? Do you think it is derogatory or appropriate? Does Saw make you feel like privacy is being invaded? Is it scary because the mystery of how the violence is applied is taken away? Do you identify with the victims willingness to do anything to survive?
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